Embrace the new!
They declared.
Projectors, Smartboards, wifi,
Go paperless!
Let’s be a digital learning environment!
And so we did, but where has that left us
when the tech department is falling apart?
The student records can’t be accessed.
The projectors are no longer connected.
The Smartboards don’t work.
The printers won’t print.
The wifi is off-line.
At least there are new whiteboard pens to start the year.
They’re the only new technology that’s working!
.
.
.
.
Big plans to revamp the entire system are not going so well. The front lines are more than a little annoyed, but it could be worse! We could be the tech dept trying to fix all those problems at every work site! Poor techies. They (like is normal for teachers) weren’t given the resources to do their jobs properly and everyone is feeling it.
It always amazes me that educators don’t educate themselves about the fallibility of technology or even its potential health and intellectual implications. As Nicholas Carr explains in his book, ‘The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,’ leaping whole hog into a fully digitized learning environment has serious implications for students’ intellectual development, much of it detrimental. That book should be required reading for all teachers and school administration.
Also, wi-fi is unhealthy. More enlightened countries like France have actually banned wi-fi in preschools and other levels of public school as well as libraries. They looked at independent international research that shows troubling health implications for exposing children and young people to a microwave-saturated environment 5 days a week, 6 hours a day. In May, over 200 scientists petitioned the UN to push for tougher standards of exposure (i.e. reduced levels) of wireless radiation. Cancer rates double for people living within 2 km. of a cell tower. For younger people with their not fully developed immune systems and thinner skulls, that rate can be up to 4 times. This has been covered up by BC health authorities, who have been given this information.
Then I suppose it’s good that our school Wifi no longer works, and isn’t expected to do so for several weeks (at least).
Get out the slates and styluses!
Seriously. It’d be helpful at this stage!
😀
Oh I remember it so well. Unfortunately it happens in other places too. Perhaps we are just trying to be too clever when it is not needed
Possible!